TIM MURPHY, - Mother Jones
Stephan: This is what our democracy has become. We have a major party putting forward men like this. We have districts gerrymandered to elect people like this. We have a Republican House filled with members like this. How can such a country properly address the real issues of the day.
In his seven years in Congress, Rep. Paul Broun (R-Ga.) distinguished himself by calling biology “lies straight from the pit of hell” and accusing President Barack Obama of establishing a secret national police force to push a Marxist dictatorship. But the man who may replace Broun in Washington could outdo him.
In a 2012 book, that candidate-pastor and talk radio host Jody Hice-alleges the gay community has a secret plot to recruit and sodomize children. In It’s Now or Never: A Call to Reclaim America, Hice also asserts that supporters of abortion rights are worse than Hitler and compares gay relationships to bestiality and incest. He proposes that Muslims be stripped of their First Amendment rights.
On Tuesday, Hice clinched a spot in the runoff to replace Broun, who declined to run for re-election in order to run for Senate. Hice will face businessman Michael Collins in the July 22 runoff. In a district that gave 62 percent of the vote to Mitt Romney two years ago, Hice, the leading vote-getter in the first round of balloting, stands a good chance of being elected to Congress.
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With his book, Hice checks virtually every box of the social conservative job application. Referring […]
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Stephan: The Superbug trend is moving into confluence with the Climate Change Trend. We are going to be hit with both, the antibiotic trend probably first. We must restructure the technologies of human societies or die. We must put wellness first, and learn to work with the Earth's great meta-systems.
In the rankings of massive problems facing humanity, the emergence of drug-resistant superbugs is rights up there with climate change, infectious disease specialists warned Thursday.
And unlike, say, CNBC host Joe Kernen’s suggestion that killer lampreys are a bigger threat than the melting Antarctic ice sheet, or the House Science Committee’s apparent belief that the search for extraterrestrial life is a bigger priority than saving our planet, this is one climate change comparison we should probably take seriously. The warning comes from Jeremy Farrar, director of the Wellcome Trust medical charity, and Mark Woolhouse of Edinburgh University’s Centre for Immunity, Infection and Evolution, and was published in the esteemed pages of the journal Nature.
‘Drugs that were once lifesavers are now worthless,” Farrar and Woolhouse write. ‘Every class of antibiotic is increasingly compromised by resistance, as are many antivirals, antiparasitic and antifungal drugs.”
Moreover, they warn, ‘It could get worse: routine medical care, surgery, cancer treatment, organ transplants and industrialized agriculture would be impossible in their present form without antimicrobials.”
The parallels are eerie: a problem caused by human activity, marked by decades of delayed action and missed opportunities, goes from prediction to reality, presenting a global threat to life as we know it.
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MAUREEN MACKEY, - The Fiscal Times
Stephan: This is a very provocative view of nutrition. It will be interesting to see how the food establishment responses, and what happens in the culture.
There are a number of links to other articles on these issues.
Be honest: That bacon, egg and cheese breakfast you scarfed down the other day was so delicious you’d love to have it for breakfast every morning. But like so many other health-conscious, weight-watching Americans, you just won’t allow yourself that indulgence. Instead, you opt for the usual low-fat, low-calorie and (oh-so-bland) oatmeal.
Now a new book, based on eight years of dogged research, echoes what more and more experts have been saying: Animal-based fats, far from being dietary demons, are actually good for us – and by eating more carbohydrates instead, we’ve been wreaking havoc on our bodies in the mistaken belief we were doing some good.
SLIDESHOW: 14 Guilt-Free High-Fat Foods
‘Not only does the best science now show that it’s a mistake to restrict fat in our diets,” says investigative journalist Nina Teicholz, author of The Big Fat Surprise: Why Butter, Meat & Cheese Belong in a Healthy Diet, ‘but our fear of saturated fats in animal foods – butter, eggs, meat – has never been based in solid science. A bias against these foods developed early on and became entrenched, though the evidence never amounted to a convincing case. And it’s since crumbled away.”
In an interview, Teicholz explained the error […]
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JOE ROMM, - Climate Progress
Stephan: This will come as no surprise to SR readers -- I have been predicting this for years -- but the recognition is growing, as this report shows, that real estate values along the coast are inevitably going to collapse and, in many cases the land itself will disappear beneath the water.
The latest scientific observations provide strong evidence we are headed toward the high end of sea level projections. And we already knew that devastating storm surges will become routine on the East Coast.
This raises the question: What year will coastal property values crash?
I first posed the question five years ago. Back then we were getting a bunch of studies suggesting sea level rise in 2100 would be 3 to 6 feet. Since then the evidence for that has become even stronger.
Just this month, multiple studies found that both the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) and Greenland are poised to continue their accelerating ice loss, with WAIS apparently now in a state of irreversible collapse. This in turn has led top climatologists and glaciologist to warn that we are headed toward the high end of sea level rise projections this century and beyond.
What does that mean for coastal property? As a National Geographic article on the subject last year put it:
In a state exposed to hurricanes as well as rising seas, people like John Van Leer, an oceanographer at the University of Miami, worry that one day they will no longer be able to insure – or […]
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JONATHAN LATHAM and ALLISON WILSON, - Independent Science News
Stephan: There is an alternative to industrial agriculture. Here is an excellent assessment of the issue, and some of the options, with many references for further exploration.
According to conventional wisdom, the Brazilian city of Belo Horizonte (pop. 2.5 million) has achieved something impossible. So, too, has the island of Cuba. They are feeding their hungry populations largely with local, low-input farming methods that enhance the environment rather than degrade it. They have achieved this, moreover, at a time of rising food prices when others have mostly retreated from their own food security goals.
The conventional wisdom contradicted by these examples is that high yielding agricultural systems necessarily reduce biodiversity. Sometimes this assumption is extended to become the “Borlaug hypothesis’ after Norman Borlaug, the architect of the green revolution. The Borlaug hypothesis states that the preservation of rainforests, an example of biodiversity, depends on intensive industrial production of sufficient food to allow for the luxury of unfarmed areas (e.g. Trewavas, 1999).
So, since Belo Horizonte and Cuba appear to have defied this logic, what is their secret? Are they succeeding in spite of their commitment to sustainability, or because of it? Or is conventional wisdom simply wrong? These pressing questions are explored in a new review, Food security and biodiversity: can we have both? by Michael Jahi Chappell and Liliana Lavalle, and published in the journal Agriculture and Human […]
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